WhoWhatWhy's Podcasts

It’s been 23 years since the 1992 race riots in LA sparked by the beating of Rodney King. With Baltimore burning, what’s really changed?  

RaidioWhoWhatWhy's Jeff Schechtman sits down with Russian-American writer and activist Masha Gessen. 

WhoWhatWhy Editor-in-Chief Russ Baker is interviewed by Boston-based syndicated radio host Chuck Morse about the Boston Marathon Bombing trial and the FBI.

American medicine, we are told, is among the best in the world. Yet treating sickness is only one measure of quality, and whether or not the system itself is healthy is up for debate. A system that treats sickness but doesn’t offer preventative measures to assure continued health is broken.   From after-the-fact health care to our love affair with pharmaceuticals, we are on the road to disaster, a...

A random walk through what the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights are really all about. A talk with the former national legal director of the ACLU and the founder of the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU Law School.     

Warren Zevon's great song, “ Lawyers, Guns and Money,” was about a kid getting out of trouble in various Latin American countries. Today, however, as we approach the 2016 presidential election, it might very well be a description of our election process. It seems that lawyers, money and enforcement are an ever-growing part of American elections. A new set of rules seems to prevail. Issues such as...

The War on Drugs has caused just as much damage, destruction, and loss of life as any war in the traditional sense. University of San Francisco professor and author of the book Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States Rebecca Gordon joins us to discuss. 

It has been 62 years since the Cuban Revolution began. Fifty-four years since the Bay of Pigs invasion. Fifty-three years since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Twenty-six years since the end of the Cold War, and 15 years since the Elian Gonzalez incident. And it is just now that we are beginning a new relationship with our neighbor 90 miles away. A significant part of our population has come of age with...

Technological change and creative destruction are everywhere. They have changed the way we work, the way we interact with each other, the foundation of education and now, the nature of warfare. We’ve all seen the media images of drones supplying us with perfect images; the perfect eye in the sky for perfectly targeted air strikes.  At least that’s how it’s looks on Homeland , and 24 and the images...

Some people are just ahead of their time.  Sometimes they are in science, or academia, or economics…but sometimes they’re in the media and they see what we all will see, long before it happens. Pioneering author, filmmaker and media reform activist Danny Schechter was such a talent.  He worked as a producer at ABC’s 20/20, where he won two Emmy Awards, and at CNN, when it was newly launched.  He w...

In spite of those words being echoed in court every day, criminal trials are often anything but a search for the truth. The court may be the trier of fact, but often facts are like Legos; they can be assembled in many ways to create different objects and stories.   Russ Baker and the team at WhoWhatWhy have been working for years to try and assemble those facts in a way that gives us some objectiv...

The role of Vladimir Putin on the world’s stage, from Syria to Ukraine, is a complicated one, and some see him as an important moderating influence on the now virtually unchallenged Western imperial apparatus. But one thing is increasingly clear: his role within his country is a deeply troubling one. And the public is terrified. Why? Consider these names: Sergei Magnitsky, Alexander Litvinenko, An...

Every prisoner says they are innocent, but some really are.  Every year hundreds of men and women are incarcerated for crimes they did not commit.   Our system is riddled with cases of perjury, mistaken identity, official misconduct and incompetents that have put innocents behind bars. The criminal justice system and the state has been ambivalent, at best, to do the right thing for those that have...

Since U.S. District Judge George A. O'Toole Jr. has prohibited the media from filming or taping the proceedings in Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's trial, the oral arguments made on Feb. 19 in the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals offer a unique opportunity. You can hear both Tsarnaev's lawyers and the prosecutors talking, revealing their approaches, skill levels and strategy. A three-judge panel at the appeals cou...

No matter its shifting place in the wider world, the United States is still the only home of "The American Dream." That's why millions of legal and illegal immigrants flock to its shores, the latter gambling against increasingly longer odds to reach a new home fraught with risks.  It's that reality that prompted filmmaker Diego Quemada-Díez  to title his award-winning debut feature film"La Jaula D...

Think we don’t have a shooting war on American soil? Tune in for the premiere of the RadioWHO podcast, where you’ll learn all about that quiet war from WhoWhatWhy reporter Douglas Lucas.  Host Guillermo Jimenez and Lucas discuss how the drug war on the Mexican border has morphed into a counterinsurgency war that has Mexican and American forces crossing into each other’s territory with surprising f...

Before "Freeway" Ricky Ross gained infamy as a $3 million-a-day Los Angeles crack dealer with hidden CIA support, he was headed to college on a tennis scholarship.  In the most explosive episode of RadioWHO yet, Ross gives host Guillermo Jimenez his definitive answer about the CIA's motives to sponsor drug dealing. Was it just to support the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, or a plot to harm black Americ...

Most people know what Hollywood agents do: but how Paul Alan Smith does it is unlike anyone else.  Smith left a lucrative job at one of Hollywood's most influential agencies to found his own:  Equitable Stewardship for Artists . The idea, Smith tells RadioWHO host Guillermo Jimenez, was to build a model agency to fundamentally change how business is done in Tinsel Town.  Tune in to listen to Paul'...